Big Fish on the Nile

Over the weekend I was in Asyut, a sleepy city that stretches, like the rest of Egypt, along the green stripe of the mighty Nile. The population is half Christian, half Muslim; half muddling through, half below the poverty line. Its previous governor, an apparently energetic man, painted the town brick red and cream. Jesus’ family stayed near Asyut for some weeks while on the run from the Romans.

I wanted to get an idea of how the revolution is playing in the provinces. I walked and talked and sat in cafés and in church courtyards. Everyone said that Asyut was peaceful and calm and that there were no problems here between Muslims and Christians; they had lived side by side for centuries. On Monday morning my translator and I went to the big concrete governorate building to find out if we might be able to interview the new governor. A young, garrulous governorate employee named Mahmoud brought us coffee while we waited.

“Before the revolution,” he told us, “the police pressed very hard on the people here.” Arrests, “commissions,” intimidation. “Now, no—but we are not sure of them.” The police, he thought, were pretending to be nice. “They are acting,” the said. “They are afraid of people since the revolution. But they are taking commissions just as before. Last month I had to get a license for my car and it was the same thing as always: twenty pounds here, twenty pounds there…. We support the people in Tahrir; we are looking to them. Here in the provinces, we cannot raise our voices.’

The police may be mostly quiescent, but the state security officers, who were the real organs of repression, have completely disappeared. Apparently they are all sitting at home on indefinite paid leave. (What they are really doing—stirring up sectarian violence, inciting protests, helping regimists to escape the country before the prosecutor-general catches up with them—is a matter of national counterrevolutionary conspiracy theory and speculation.) Mahmoud said that a man from state security sat in every office and department in the governorate building—“in every mosque, in every church, in every public building!”—reporting on what people said, what they did, and any possible hint of subversion. I think I had not fully appreciated the extent of Mubarak’s police state.

The head of the media department, one floor up, had a similar wide smile. “Yes, there was a state security man—he sat right there,” he said, pointing to a desk. “After the revolution we could look him in the eye and say, ‘So here we are!’ ” He said there were twenty-six state security officers in the governorate building; now there are none. “They knew every single detail about everyone!” he said, circling his arms to show the breadth of the surveillance.

“What is most different for you now?” I asked. He smiled broadly again. “To tell the truth! Before every press release was made to look very positive. Now we have problems with shortages of bottled gas, with shortages of kerosene. The bakers are baking the subsidized bread too small or not enough.”

Ibrahim Hamid was appointed governor by the Supreme Military Council and the Prime Minister about six weeks ago, after all the previous regime-era governors were fired under pressure from protesters. The new ones, like the old ones, are almost all ex-military or police. Hamid was a senior figure in the national police and an assistant to Habib Adly: the former Interior Minister, now in jail, who is probably the least popular man in Egypt. As we entered his large, beige and gold office, Hamid was talking to an official about the problem of people who had used the cover of the revolution to build on farmland illegally.

The Governor was effusive in his welcome, and happy to reiterate the Army’s public position. “We are following now totally new rules,” he told me, “and our goals are from the youth and revolution. We are working under their auspices.” I asked him what it was like to be faced with the aftermath of a revolution after having spent his career in the police of Mubarak’s regime. “There were some mistakes,” he acknowledged, adhering to the boilerplate, “but I am with the revolution a hundred percent.” He ordered some lemonade and showed me his beautiful view of the Nile; when I came back, he said, he would like to take me on a boat trip.

“He seemed very nice,” I said to one of his young assistants, who had kindly offered to drive me back to my hotel. “All of them seem nice,” he said. “All of them are for the revolution after the revolution.”